Storage subsystems generally consist of a number of disk drives that can be aggregated and made to appear as virtual disk drives to one or more client computers. To improve performance, storage subsystems usually deploy a cache which is used to hold frequently accessed disk blocks. The choice of which disk blocks to cache can have a significant impact on overall system performance. Some storage subsystems attempt to anticipate which disk blocks may be required by client computers by examining historical patterns of access to disk blocks. The nature of such cache management algorithms is predictive.
Although there are techniques today for the management of requests to access data in communications environments, these techniques can cause a storage subsystem to load data into its cache that is not accessed within the expected time because of their predictive nature. Thus, there is still a need for further techniques to facilitate the management of requests to access data in computer environments.